For me it seems strange that a 200Mlj Mars robot (like Insight,etc) meet the end of life becouse of dust on solar panels. Why they aren’t equiped with some kind of vibration mechanism or windshield wiper-similar thech to deal with a problem? This seems to me like WTF?
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They were equipped with a wide variety of ways to deal with dust. So much so that a mission only expected to last 90 days ended up lasting years.
But you can’t undo all the damage. Every so often one of those little rocks will be just massive and sharp enough to put a little scratch on the panel. And once they are there, they never go away. Combine that with all the little bits of damage building up on every other component and the fact that some things like batteries are going to be breaking down over time anyway and rover death becomes inevitable.
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